Wikipedia:WikiProject Philosophy/Language

Welcome to WikiProject Philosophy of Language (WPPL), a subproject of WikiProject Philosophy.

Scope and Goals

The focus of WPPL will be to work as diligently as is humanly possible to create professional-quality, thoroughly documented, and encyclopedic articles on the philosophy of language and to integrate them as much as possible with work from all branches of linguistics: psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, etc..

Philosophy of language is a particularly challenging, field because much of its most important and groundbreaking work lies at the subtle confine between philosophy and mathematical logic, between the humanities and rigorous scientific research. It attempts to bridge the gap between the so-called two cultures by creating a synthesizing third culture that includes and enhances the first two.

The current main article of philosophy of language contains hardly any information on important theoretical concepts and what it does contain is extremely ill-organized and confused. Philosophy of language is a large and complex field. Indeed, the analytic tradition of philosophy has traditionally, and continues to, place a tremendous amount of importance on the analysis of language as the vehicle of thought. According to most analytic philosophers that which we want to explain is the nature of thoughts. What are they? What is their structure and constitution? What are there relations with one another in the processes of reasoning and of deliberation which ultimately result in the performance of actions. Unlike the psychologist, we are not interested here, however, in the specific processes or activities of individual thought in and of themselves. That which should concern the philosopher of language are the contents of thoughts: their comprehensibility, communicability and objectivity (or perhaps intersubjectivity). As Michael Dummett has put it: that which distinguishes analytic philosophy, in all of it diverse manifestations, from other schools is the conviction that, in the first place, a philosophical explanation of thought can be acheived through a philosophical explanation of language, and secondly, that a comprehensive explanation is achievable only in this way.

The vast amount of information is too much for one or two people to handle. The coordinative effort of all those willing to assist is needed.

Since we are a derivative of WikiProject Philosophy, our goals are very similar and are as follows:

1. To serve as a nexus and discussion area for contributors with knowledge of philosophy of language;
2. To identify those areas of philosophy of langauge which lack sufficient coverage on Wikipedia;
3. To improve those articles that need help;
4. To create a general map of the philosophy of language articles and subjects on Wikipedia and link the articles together accordingly.

Current goals

• Identify and create missing philosophy of language content (see Writing and Editing)
• Improve the categorization and organization of philosophy of language material
• Gather interest and participation in a philosophy of language community within Wikipedia, including a Philosophy of Language Collaboration project
• Please try to think of all possible renderings of terms before deciding that they don't exist. If they don't exist under any rendering then create a stub (or article if you see fit) and then create the pages for the different possible renderings and add the command: #REDIRECT Name of article you created, in order to redirect all the renderings to one page. Example: type physicalism has identity theory of mind, type-type theory, type materialism, etc. all redirected to it. This can often be done with many names of concepts listed on the main Philosophy Wikiproject's "list of philosophical concepts."

Writing and Editing

Articles in need of attention

• Anaphora (linguistics) - Definitely needs more philosophy (e.g., the Geach Hob-Nob sentence.)
• Paul Boghossian
• Implicature
• principle of charity (expansion)

Requested articles

• "The Meaning of "Meaning"" - different book, separate article. (Putnam)
• "A Plea For Excuses" (Austin)
• Attributive use of descriptions and Referential use of descriptions (probably one article should suffice)
• Frege's puzzle
• Guise theory
• "How To Do Things With Words" (Austin)
• Linguistic community
• "Logic and Conversation" (Grice)
• "Naming and Necessity" (Kripke)
• Hector-Neri Castañeda
• Saturated and unsaturated expressions (Frege)
• Jason Stanley
• "Truth and Meaning" (Davidson)

New or improved articles

• "On Denoting" (Russell)
• Keith Donnellan